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If a man’s prayers are a true indication of the theology of his heart, then prayers in the Puritan tradition point to faith in a glorious God and true humility before Him. In The Valley of Vision Arthur Bennett offers a collection of prayers gleaned from the prayers and writings of English Protestantism.1

Knowing as they did the inward evil remaining in even the most sincere believer, the Puritans encouraged self-abasement and continual repentance. These extracts from their prayers offer a sense of their piety and hunger for grace.

Here the prayer is for self-knowledge before God:

ETERNAL FATHER,
Thou art good beyond all thought,
But I am vile, wretched, miserable, blind;
My lips are ready to confess, but my heart is slow to feel,
. . . . and my ways reluctant to amend.
I bring my soul to thee;
. . . . break it, wound it, bend it, mould it.
Unmask to me sin’s deformity,
. . . . that I may hate it, abhor it, flee from it.

Conscious of sin, the penitent soul seeks refuge in the death of Jesus:

Yet still I live, and fly repenting to thy outstretched arms;
. . . . thou wilt not cast me off, for Jesus brings me near,
. . . . thou wilt not condemn me, for he died in my stead,
. . . . thou wilt not mark my mountains of sin, for he levelled all,
. . . . and his beauty covers my deformities.

O my God, I bid farewell to sin by clinging to his cross,
. . . . hiding in his wounds, and sheltering in his side.

Ultimately the penitent seeks not only forgiveness but life through grace:

Give me to distinguish between the mere form of godliness and its power,
. . . . between life and a name to live,
. . . . between guile and truth,
. . . . between hypocrisy and a religion that will bear thy eye.
If I am not right, set me right, keep me right;
And may I at last come to thy house in peace.2

Footnotes:

1 Arthur Bennett was a canon of St. Alban’s Cathedral, rector of Little Munden and Sacombe, Hertfordshire, and tutor at All Nations Christian College. He died in 1994, aged 79 years.

2 Arthur Bennett, ed., The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1975), 70, 10, 95.

“And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none” (Ezekiel 22:30).

Not all men are true men—at least not in the eyes of God. True men lead, speak out, and stand firm. They “stand in the gap” in times of crisis. They build great cities and organizations, but at their best, they build up the Church. In the counsels of heaven, a search committee of One looks for those who have the courage and moral fiber to do what is right. Because God is God, He does not need experts, technicians, or skilled orators to accomplish His work. He simply needs men.

During the time of the rise of Babylonian empire, God looked for a man to warn the wicked people of Judah and its leaders of their impending doom. Judah’s breathtaking wickedness prompted God’s swift and righteous judgment on the inhabitants of Zion. The many dark deeds of Judah included bloodshed and murder (vv. 22:1-5), government corruption (v. 6), a hatred of parents (vv. 7a, 10), extortion (vv. 7, 12), sexual immorality (vv. 10-11), and greed (v. 13). For these and like actions, God promised decisive punishment. Although the Babylonian captivity certainly involved physical removal from Jerusalem, the penalty in full meant the complete undoing of an unfaithful people—“I will gather you and blow on you with the fire of my wrath, and you shall be melted in the midst of it” (v. 21).

Religious leaders led the parade of infidelity and hatred of God. The Lord described the prophets as co-conspirators with evil (v. 25). By approving the sin of Judah’s princes or staying silent, the prophets themselves betrayed the innocent. By refusing to speak out against the immorality of their day and by covering up for sins of political leaders, the prophets “smeared whitewash for them, seeing false visions and divining lies for them” (v. 28). In doing so, these supposed servants of God dipped their hands in blood unjustly shed. Those responsible for leading worship did the same. By failing to distinguish between “the holy and the common” (e.g., corrupting reverence toward God in worship), the priests made the sovereign God into a public laughingstock.

In the midst of such abomination, God “sought a man to build up a wall and stand in the breach” (v. 30). Such a man preaches sin and judgment—and the blessings of repentance—without fear or favor. But in all of Israel, God could not find this man. It takes courage, after all, to stand alone for God. Due to the shortage, God called Ezekiel, who informed Judah that they had not been forgiven. For this message, Ezekiel was mocked (cf. vv. 20:49; 33:30-32). Those who follow Ezekiel’s model should expect the same.

Could the Lord find a man in today’s multitude of preachers and teachers? Could He find a prophet who spoke the truth to cultural power and a priest who resolved to keep the holy things of God holy? Men act upon conviction and virtue. Cowards wait for poll results and position themselves in the middle. Godly men act out of confidence in the Word of God. False prophets say what people want to hear. True prophets embark upon a narrow way, a path not for the faint of heart.

George Whitefield (1714 – 1770) looked out over a sea of faces darkened by coal dust from the pits. He saw “white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully ran down their black cheeks.”1 It was late winter 1739, the third day that Whitefield had preached the gospel to this unlikely crowd, known for their godlessness. These men (estimated at twenty thousand) were a terror when provoked, and the preacher rightly feared they might attack him. Still, he was confident of God’s providence, and so he preached on—with great effect.

One historian has noted that “[18th century] Anglican Evangelicals had . . . [a] profound effect on the middle classes.”2 Yet to a significant degree the Church had lost contact with the neighborhood where the poorest people lived and worked. The clergy of the day held little hope for their conversion to Christ and for the moral reform of their communities, but Whitefield was determined to try. When he saw that the area God had laid upon his heart had no schools or churches, he took to the outdoors.

This was curious behavior in the eyes of his contemporaries. Even so bold a preacher as John Wesley had his reservations. As he wrote in his journal, March 31, 1739:

“[I]n the evening I reached Bristol, and met Mr. Whitefield there. I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he set me an example on Sunday: having been all my life . . . so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin, if it had not been done in church.”3

Of course, Wesley himself became an open-air preacher, but it took Whitefield to break the mold.

When God has an unusual work to do, He raises up unusual men. George Whitefield was such a man. His parents owned an inn, and his earliest years were spent in its coarse and ungodly environment. He was not a man of great stature, and he had a squint, which his enemies in later life exploited with the nickname, “Dr. Squintum.” Yet from his unpromising background, he went up to Pembroke College at the University of Oxford and was later ordained as an Anglican clergyman. He would emerge from its rarified confines as an evangelist for people at all levels of society.

Whitefield is a prime example of anointed service outside the minister’s comfort zone. Ignoring physical danger and the threat of “professional suicide,” he was faithful to God’s calling—and God used him mightily to stoke the fires of the Great Awakening. Whitefield took great risks and enjoyed great manifestations of God’s power.

Many pastors pray for Awakening in this day. To this end, they might well follow Whitefield in the prayerful question, “Lord, is there an unusual work for me to do?”

Footnotes:

1 Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England: From Watts and Wesley to Maurice 1690-1850, vol. 2 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961), 147.

2 Ibid., 238

3 John Wesley, The Works of Reverend John Wesley, vol. l (New York: J & J Harper, 1827), 251.

In March 1848, the well-known Hartford pastor Horace Bushnell (1802 – 1876) gained a remarkable honor: he received invitations to deliver prestigious theological addresses at New England’s most famous educational institutions: Andover Seminary, Harvard, and Yale. The three schools, long since engaged in pitched theological battles with each other, all derived their inheritance from Puritanism. But times had changed. Harvard had become Unitarian while Andover and Yale argued over who was the rightful heir to Jonathan Edwards’ Calvinist legacy. In his addresses to these disputants, Bushnell lectured his audiences with the following message: your doctrinal quarrels are unnecessary; it is time we all simply got along.1

Bushnell naively believed he had discovered a way of putting an end to all theological controversy. In February 1849, he argued in God in Christ, the published version of his three talks, that language—the Bible in particular—does not offer objective rational truth about God. This explains why he so blithely thought that Unitarians and orthodox Calvinists could easily put aside their differences. Both groups thought they accurately understood the nature of God. The former denied that Jesus was divine. The latter rightly considered this heresy. But the two sides agreed on one thing: they could not both be right.

Bushnell swept away such debates over theology because he was a mystic who believed that truth was metaphorical, fluid, and constantly changing. Although he preferred the language of the Trinity to the colder-Deist version, he thought unity between the warring factions could be achieved if only they would give up their confidence in their theological convictions. Describing the virtues of his “big tent” approach, the Hartford pastor opined, “My ruling endeavor has been in all my investigations of truth, to find a form of doctrine broad enough to include, as far as possible, the opposing truths or half-truths which Christian believers are contending.”2 His desire for unity at all costs subsequently led him away from orthodoxy. Ironically, Bushnell satisfied no one. Calvinistic opponents branded him a heretic. For their part, the once intrigued Unitarians thought better of inviting him to take the Hollis Chair in theology at Harvard.

One might be tempted to conclude that Horace Bushnell was little more than a patron saint of lost causes who has long since been forgotten. Not so. From the turn of the twentieth century until the present, Bushnell has become a hero of theological liberalism, a thinker whose intellectual permissiveness led to generations of other pastors downplaying the centrality of biblical authority and historic Christian beliefs. His 1847 work on Christian Nurture expostulated the idea that children are not under the curse of the Fall, and therefore do not need to be “converted” to avoid damnation—a notion now commonly accepted in modern mainline Protestant denominations. Forebodingly, Bushnell was a man ahead of his times.

God’s people today are continually told that their beliefs are outdated, irrelevant, or in need of modification. Critics of evangelical theology chide their conservative counterparts for taking their beliefs too seriously and not having an “open mind.” They are told that the language of Christian belief is flexible and malleable to the vicissitudes of cultural opinion. The Church has heard such voices before, but the questions are fundamentally the same as they were in Bushnell’s time. Has God spoken objectively with finality in His written Word? If He has, what then must be believed? What must be denied? In light of these things, how must human beings live? The Scriptures have spoken clearly on all of these matters in spite of some—even those within the bounds of the organized religion—who would obscure the biblical message.

Footnotes:

1 For a thorough summary of Bushnell’s life and teaching, see Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 111-178.

2 Horace Bushnell, cited in Robert Bruce Mullin, The Puritan as Yankee (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 56.